Hello, World

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 12:15:14 +0000

Even though I’ve been working on learning web development for a while now, it seems appropriate to start this blog like a new project with the customary Hello, World. With that, allow me to introduce myself.

My name is Dennis Pitman. I’m originally from Texas, but now I live in Arlington, Virginia. I’m a huge nerd for many different things, and when I get interested in something, I dive deep. In high school I became a nerd about music, and six years later I had two degrees in music composition. Around that time, the market crashed, and I decided that music wasn’t a stable career path. Like many people, I thought “Hmm, I’m a good student. Maybe I should try going to law school.”

That’s how I ended up taking the LSAT and going to George Mason University School of Law in Arlington. I graduated in three years near the top of my class, passed the bar, and…was immediately unemployed. Since then I’ve been job hunting, doing pro bono work, and holding down a part-time position as a researcher and general attorney-type-person for the Center for Infrastructure Protection and Homeland Security at George Mason.

As part of my job at the center, it fell on me to edit and maintain the center’s website, a Wordpress static site with a theme made by somebody years ago. In the process of wrestling with the site, our publication moved from a print/pdf format to a blog, which I also had to edit and publish. To accomplish that, I learned HTML5 (refreshing my middle-school-level knowledge of HTML that I once used to make Final Fantasy fan sites on Geocities…see previous nerd comment) and CSS.

I started out on Codecademy with their free web design courses, and after finishing those, I thought it might be fun to learn some real programming by going through some javascript and PHP tutorials. That set my obsessive nerd tendencies into motion. In the two years since, I’ve been learning the basics of several languages and completing dozens of computer science and development tutorials. Being into gaming as well as web apps, I thought it might be fun to learn C++ to work in the Unreal Engine, then C# to work in Unity. I’ve been doing courses on all kinds of platforms, completing algorithm challenges, and doing mini-projects from various tutorials.

Eventually I realized that I was having fun doing something I could probably make a career of if I could manage to focus instead of letting my impulses drive my self-education. This blog is part of that process. Over time, I expect the look of this site to change. As I typed this, I’m just learning Markdown and Jekyll. I expect I’ll use this blog as an opportunity to learn a new CSS framework, perhaps Semantic UI. I also want to post my thoughts on the many tutorials, sites, and courses I’ve tried out over the past few years, and share my experiences as I venture into new projects on my path to hopefully starting a career in tech, either as a developer or as a tech-savvy attorney.

If you choose to read my posts, thank you for joining me. Feel free to contact me at dpitman@dennis-pitman.com.